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Does Social Spending Add Substance to Formal Rights?
Abstract
This article examines the effects of social spending on political participation and various forms of collective action conditioned on a state's level of respect for empowerment rights. It brings the language of rights to the more well-developed comparative study of voter turnout. I theorize that a state which spends more on social initiatives drives down economic and social barriers between individuals and the polls or participating in collective action. This increases the substantive use of rights guaranteed formally by the state. I find that spending helps most where rights are already respected. I also find that spending can negatively impact participatory democracy where these rights are less well established. Ultimately, I conclude that institutional strength has a greater effect on the substantive use of rights than social spending.
Mediante el análisis teórico del gasto social y sus impactos sobre la distribución del ingreso y la superación de la pobreza, se exploran los resultados del gasto social registrados en las diferentes gestiones gubernamentales de los últimos cuatro sexenios. Si bien es conocido que a nivel general se han tenido avances y retrocesos en la distribución del ingreso, se hace una revisión para conocer las acciones que fueron favorables y aquellas que no abonaron en la consecución de un mejor resultado, además de realizar algunas prospectivas y recomendaciones para una política de gasto social que sea compatible con el crecimiento y que en el mediano plazo torne a una Política Social con enfoque de derechos y en el largo plazo a su universalidad.
The 1990s saw some of the most dramatic changes in the American social welfare system in recent decades at both the national and state levels. In particular, states were granted, and took advantage of, much wider latitude in deciding who is eligible to receive welfare benefits. To what extent did the composition of a state's electorate influence the restrictiveness of the welfare eligibility requirements it adopted at this time? We find that in states where lower-class voter turnout was comparable to that of the upper class, lawmakers were less likely to pass restrictive welfare eligibility rules. We also find that electorates in states with restrictive voter registration laws are much more likely to be biased toward upper-class turnout. Thus, lower-class voter mobilization can affect the ability of the disadvantaged to achieve policies consistent with their interests, but state voter registration laws pose a substantial barrier to such mobilization.
Recent studies show that corruption is associated with higher military spending [Eur. J. Polit. Econ. 17 (2001) 794] and lower government spending on education and health care [J. Publ. Econ. 69 (1998) 263]. This suggests that policies aimed at reducing corruption may lead to changes in the composition of government outlays toward more productive spending. However, little empirical evidence has been presented to support the claim that public spending improves education and health indicators in developing and transition countries. This paper uses cross-sectional data for 50 such countries to show that increased public expenditure on education and health care is associated with improvements in both access to and attainment in schools, and reduces mortality rates for infants and children. The education regressions are robust to different specifications, but the relationship between health care spending and mortality rates is weaker.
This study examines whether the state’s ability to provide social welfare services has any major effect on the probability of civil conflict onset. We argue that welfare spending contributes to sustaining peace because the provision of social services reduces grievances by offsetting the effects of poverty and inequality in society. Welfare spending serves as an indication of the commitment of the government to social services and reflects its priorities and dedication to citizens. By enacting welfare policies that improve the living standards of citizens, governments can co-opt the political opposition and decrease the incentives for organizing a rebellion. Utilizing time-series, cross-national data for the 1975–2005 period, the results indicate that as the level of the government investment in welfare policies (i.e. education, health, and social security) increases, the likelihood of civil conflict onset declines significantly, controlling for several other covariates of internal conflict. Additional data analysis shows that general public spending and military expenditures are unlikely to increase or decrease the probability of civil unrest. Overall, these findings suggest that certain types of public spending, such as welfare spending, might have a strong pacifying effect on civil conflict, and therefore the state’s welfare efforts are vital for the maintenance of peace.
While it is universally recognized that states are responsible for human rights conditions in their jurisdictions, it is less often noticed that this responsibility has two dimensions, one normative and one empirical. Normatively, most people agree that states ought to prevent human rights abuses. Empirically, however, states may not always be able to do so. In weak and failing states, agency loss and the inability to police effectively can lead to abuses by private individuals and rogue agents of the state. Thus, on balance, weak states typically have worse human rights records than strong ones. This is demonstrated by a global time-series cross-section analysis showing that indicators of state weakness — low tax revenues, corruption, and lack of law and order — all have a negative impact on human rights to personal security. The effect differs for different kinds of rights. Extrajudicial killings are highly sensitive to state capacity, while political imprisonment is more sensitive to democracy. Overall, however, it appears that the totalitarian model of human rights abuse by excessively strong states applies to a restricted set of cases. The more common problem is states that cannot effectively protect human rights. We must take state failure seriously when thinking about the causes of — and remedies for — human rights abuse.
This article argues that social welfare policies may reduce international and domestic terrorism. Social policies likely affect terrorism in offsetting ways but, on balance, should diminish preferences for terrorism by reducing economic insecurity, inequality, poverty, and religious-political extremism. Thus, countries with more generous welfare provisions should suffer fewer terrorist attacks on their soil and have fewer of their citizens perpetrate terrorism. Supporting this argument, cross-sectional estimation reveals that a country's welfare efforts negatively correlate with transnational or total terrorist incidents on its soil, as well as transnational terrorism perpetrated by its citizens. Pooled cross-section time-series estimation reveals that several measures of welfare effort reduce the incidence of transnational terrorism in countries, robust to a range of estimators and controls. Such findings suggest that strengthening social policies at home and abroad may not only serve redistributive or development goals but also help combat terrorist violence.
Human Rights Quarterly 18.1 (1996) 23-66
If economic, social, and cultural rights are to be taken seriously, there needs to be a change in the paradigm for evaluating compliance with the norms established in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (hereinafter the Covenant). "Progressive realization," the current standard used to assess state compliance with economic, social, and cultural rights, is inexact and renders these rights difficult to monitor. Monitoring the major international human rights covenants is central to the development of a meaningful international human rights system. Otherwise, countries that ratify or accede to specific human rights instruments cannot assess their own performance in promoting effective realization of the enumerated rights. Further, without effective monitoring, states cannot be held accountable for implementation of, or be made liable for violation of, these rights.
To assist states parties in fulfilling their obligations and to enable international monitors to evaluate a country's performance, each of the major international human rights covenants requires the regular submission of reports by states parties for review by UN established committees of experts. However, these requirements do not ensure necessarily that effective monitoring will take place. Monitoring state compliance is a complex and exacting process with numerous political and methodological prerequisites. Although effective monitoring requires the systematic collection and analysis of appropriate data, the determination of which data are relevant depends on translating the abstract legal norms, in which the various human rights covenants are framed, into operational standards. To accomplish this operationalization, specific enumerated rights (for example, the right to education) need to be adequately conceptualized and developed to measure implementation or to identify potential violations. These indicators, some of which may be based on statistical data, can then provide yardsticks to evaluate state compliance. Otherwise, the preparation and review of reports can be little more than a formality.
This article reviews the problems that the current performance standard of "progressive realization" entails for monitoring economic, social, and cultural rights, and proposes a "violations approach" as a more feasible and effective alternative. The violations approach advocated here focusses on three types of violations: (1) violations resulting from actions and policies on the part of governments; (2) violations related to patterns of discrimination; and (3) violations taking place due to a state's failure to fulfill the minimum core obligations contained in the Covenant. In order to illustrate examples of violations of the rights enumerated in the Covenant, this article analyzes several years of reports by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
At first glance, the assertion that little effective or systematic monitoring of the Covenant is taking place seems to be at variance with the current international human rights system. The principle that the two major categories of rights, civil and political rights on the one hand and economic, social, and cultural rights on the other, are interrelated, interdependent, and indivisible constitutes one of the fundamental underpinnings of the international consensus on human rights norms. This principle has been endorsed on numerous occasions by the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council, the Commission on Human Rights, and international conferences, the most recent being the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights. In addition to the Covenant, several other international human rights instruments enumerate economic, social, and cultural rights. These include the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Countries which become states parties to these instruments also assume the international obligation to submit periodic reports to the United Nations on the measures that they have adopted and the progress made in achieving compliance. As of March 1995, 130 countries had become states parties to the Covenant.
Currently, states parties to the Covenant are requested to submit an initial report dealing with the entire Covenant within two years of the Covenant's entry into force and to submit a periodic report every five years thereafter. These reports are reviewed by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a body of experts (hereinafter the Committee...
The authors examine the impact of the international human rights regime on governments' human rights practices. They propose an explanation that highlights a "paradox of empty promises." Their core arguments are that the global institutionalization of human rights has created an international context in which (1) governments often ratify human rights treaties as a matter of window dressing, radically decoupling policy from practice and at times exacerbating negative human rights practices, but (2) the emergent global legit-imacy of human rights exerts independent global civil society effects that improve states' actual human rights practices. The authors' statistical analyses on a comprehensive sample of government re-pression from 1976 to 1999 find support for their argument.
State repression includes harassment, surveillance/spying, bans, arrests, torture, and mass killing by government agents and/or affiliates within their territorial jurisdiction. Over the past 40 years, the systematic study of state repression has grown considerably. The development of this work, however, has been uneven. Though unified in their focus on the problem of order (i.e., trying to ascertain how political authorities wield coercive power amid potential and actual domestic challengers), different scholars tend to emphasize distinct aspects of the topic. Consequently, a great deal of progress has been made in specific areas but others have lagged behind. In this review, I attempt to identify the dominant traditions in the repression literature, the core empirical findings, and some persisting puzzles.
Most studies posit and identify a linear and negative relationship between democracy and the violation of human rights. Some research challenges this finding, however, suggesting that nonlinear influences exist. Within this article, we examine the structure of the relationship between democracy and repression during the time period from 1976 to 1996. To conduct our analysis, we utilize diverse statistical approaches which are particularly flexible in identifying influences that take a variety of functional forms (specifically LOESS and binary decomposition). Across measures and methodological techniques, we found that below a certain level, democracy has no impact on human rights violations, but above this level democracy influences repression in a negative and roughly linear manner. The implications of this research are discussed within the conclusion.
We introduce a new, easily accessed and objective measure of the enforceability of contracts and the security of property rights. This measure, called contract-intensive money or CIM, is based on citizens decisions regarding the form in which they choose to hold their financial assets. Country case studies show that CIM varies over time in response to political events in ways predicted by our arguments. We also show that CIM is positively related to investment and growth rates, and to the relative size of contract-dependent sectors of the economy.
The occasion of the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex is a good time to reflect on the contributions that empirical political science has made to the study of human rights. The Department of Government at Essex, one of the participating departments in the Human Rights Centre, has a strong reputation in theory-driven empirical research aimed at providing answers to substantive research questions by testing hypotheses through systematic analysis of evidence. The Department was founded by comparative politics scholar Jean Blondel, and ever since members of the department have engaged in the qualitative and quantitative comparative analysis of many countries, few countries, and single countries to examine a wide range of substantive topics in political science, many of which have been directly or indirectly related to human rights. The Department also has a strong tradition in normative political theory, and Professor Michael Freeman in particular has published widely on the topic of human rights, in addition to setting up and running the MA in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights for many years. In addition to the core course on Political Theory and Human Rights originally designed by Professor Freeman, the Department also offers my own course, the Comparative Politics of Human Rights, which is devoted to the systematic study and analysis of the choices, conditions, and beliefs that either enhance or undermine the promotion of human dignity. Students on the course engage with rationalist, structuralist, and culturalist empirical theories at the domestic and international level, comparative methods and measurement for the analysis of human rights, and exemplars from the comparative political science literature on human rights, such as Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink's The Power of Human Rights, Neil Mitchell's Agents of Atrocity, Clifford Bob's The Marketing of Rebellion, and my own Protecting Human Rights. The course is thus very much in keeping with the comparative tradition of the Department of Government, but has responded to the increasing interest within empirical political science in the systematic analysis of human rights problems. But political science has not always been interested in human rights, even though in my view, the kinds of questions that human rights scholars and practitioners pose are at the core of what the discipline has been studying since the days of Aristotle. 'Modern' political science, or that which developed since the advent of 'American' political science at the turn of the 20th century, has had a changing and evolving relationship with human rights. The early 'public law' phase of the discipline at the beginning of the 20th century
is a popular strategy to enforce international human rights norms and laws. Nongovernmental organizations, news media, and international organizations publicize countries' violations and urge reform. Evidence that these spotlights are followed by improvements is anecdotal. This article analyzes the relationship between global naming and shaming efforts and governments' human rights practices for 145 countries from 1975 to 2000. The statistics show that governments put in the spotlight for abuses continue or even ramp up some violations afterward, while reducing others. One reason is that governments' capacities for human rights improvements vary across types of violations. Another is that governments are strategically using some violations to offset other improvements they make in response to international pressure to stop violations.
This book draws on key theories and methods from the social sciences to develop a framework for the systematic study of human rights problems. It argues that solid empirical analysis of human rights problems rests on examining the observable practices from state and non-state actors that constitute human rights violations to provide plausible explanations for their occurrence and provide deeper understanding of their meaning. Such explanations and understanding draws on the theoretical insights from rational, structural and cultural approaches in the social sciences. This book includes: • an outline of the scope of human rights • the terrain of key actors that have an impact on human rights • a summary of the social science theories, methods and measures for studying human rights • a separate treatment of global comparative studies, truth commissions, and human rights impact assessment. Studying Human Rights is the first book to use the synthesis of social sciences approaches to studying human rights and its quantitative and qualitative approach provides useful insights. This book makes a unique contribution to the existent literature on human rights and is an invaluable tool for both scholars and practitioners of this area.
This volume argues that international human rights law has made a positive contribution to the realization of human rights in much of the world. Although governments sometimes ratify human rights treaties, gambling that they will experience little pressure to comply with them, this is not typically the case. Focusing on rights stakeholders rather than the United Nations or state pressure, Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analyses and case studies that the ratification of treaties leads to better rights practices on average. By several measures, civil and political rights, women’s rights, a right not to be tortured in government detention, and children’s rights improve, especially in the very large heterogeneous set of countries that are neither stable autocracies nor stable democracies. Simmons argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.
This research note describes an update to Golder's (2005) Democratic Electoral Systems (DES) dataset. We extend the temporal scope of the original dataset by including all legislative and presidential elections that took place in democratic states from 2001 to 2011. In addition to significantly expanding the size of the DES dataset, we offer a simplified classification scheme for electoral systems. We also provide more detailed information about all democratic elections since 1946, including the dates for each round of elections as well as the rules used in different electoral tiers. A brief temporal and geographic overview of the data is presented.
Does economic adversity affect whether people vote? Data from the November 1974 Current Population Survey are used to estimate the effect that unemployment, poverty, and a decline in financial well-being have on voter turnout. Each economic problem suppresses participation. These individual level findings are corroborated with aggregate time-series data from presidential and midterm elections since 1896. When a person suffers economic adversity his scarce resources are spent holding body and soul together, not on remote concerns like politics. Economic problems both increase the opportunity costs of political participation and reduce a person's capacity to attend to politics.
According to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not an indication of stagnating human rights practices. Instead, it reflects a systematic change in the way monitors, like Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, encounter and interpret information about abuses. The standard of accountability used to assess state behaviors becomes more stringent as monitors look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse. In this article, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression using existing data. I then show that respect for human rights has improved over time and that the relationship between human rights respect and ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positive, which contradicts findings from existing research.
I investigate how and why the Shah's policies of accommodation and repression escalated the revolutionary mobilization of the Iranian population. Several major theories--micromobilization theory, value expectancy, and bandwagon (critical mass) models--are used to sort out the empirical relationships between protest behavior (violent and nonviolent), strikes, spatial diffusion, concessions, and repression in the year prior to the Shah's exit from Iran. Estimates from Poisson regression models show that repression had a short-term negative effect and a long-term positive effect on overall levels of protest via repression's influence on spatial diffusion. I infer that this pattern of effects stems from a combination of deterrent and micromobilization mechanisms. Concessions expanded the protests by accelerating massive urban strikes that in turn generated more opposition activity throughout Iran. Spatial diffusion was encouraged by government concessions and massive labor strikes. Mutually reinforcing relationships between concessions, strikes, and spatial diffusion indicate the significance of intergroup dynamics in the revolutionary process.
Human Rights Quarterly 17.1 (1995) 170-191
Current US foreign policy goals put great stress on extending democracy, and US legislation -- never systematically enforced -- has banned aid to gross violators of human rights for two decades, making exceptions for aid which benefits needy people.
Gross violations of human rights which are criminalized in international law include genocide, extrajudicial executions, and torture. These violations are labeled herein as violations of life-integrity.
Based on a coded content analysis of Amnesty International Reports for 1987 and Freedom House rankings, this article will examine the relationship between life-integrity violations and freedom in 145 states during 1987 and will probe two alternate hypotheses. Our findings support the second, which asserts that there will be more conflict mobilized and incentives for repression -- i.e., worse violations of life integrity -- as democracy is extended before it is fully institutionalized (More Murder in the Middle). This article further examines the effects of ethnic discrimination, war, development, and inequality (and the linkages among them) on life-integrity violations, and considers the implications for research and policy.
Since the end of the Cold War, democracy has gained new ground in many states and has become a renewed object of US foreign policy in the Clinton Administration. The sterile and ideological debate over the precedence, linkage, or priority of social and economic rights versus political and civil rights in less developed or poorer states has been almost forgotten as people in those states protest and rebel against their authoritarian governments. One premise of the ideological assertion that political and civil rights must be subordinated for the sake of development was that despotism led to economic growth. The assumption that authoritarianism was more likely than democracy to produce growth has been disconfirmed by Kurzman, reviewing three decades of data: 1952-1982.
Several questions can be posed about these developments. Do democracy and democratization protect the most basic of human rights? What are the most basic rights? Why should we expect that it does? If it does not, how can this be explained?
I begin with the assumption that the right to exist and to be free from bodily invasion and terror of being caught, held, and disappeared is a basic desideratum among humans which transcends culture and ages. Sociologically, rights are claims successfully wrested from governments and other power holders. I label certain acts as violations of life-integrity because the violations negate an integrated set of claims respecting the biological and social integration of persons and groups: A) the integrity of mind and body (denied by genocide, murder, torture, and terror); B) of being the owner of one's labor and being able to move (denied by slavery, segregation, and apartheid); C) the integration of self and family which creates progeny (denied by prohibiting marriage and family development); and D) of the reciprocal guarantees for the protection of human groups (denied by genocide).
These rights, and their violations (see Figure 1) are defined in international law and in four of six cases criminalized by special conventions. For two decades, US domestic laws regulating foreign aid have recognized these rights under "respect for the integrity of the person" in the annual State Department report on countries' human rights practices.
Although there is hypothetically more than one dimension of life-integrity (e.g., rights 4, 5, and 6 in Figure 1 might have another dimension behind them), the present research examines only one dimension, Dimension A, which includes the right to life; the right to personal inviolability; and the right to be free of fear of arbitrary seizure, detention, and punishment. [Figure 1]
Given the similarity between Dimension A (hereinafter referred to as life-integrity) and the substance of guarantees of personal security dating from the Magna Carta which are embedded in the western liberal tradition, one might expect that the more states embodied the ideal of liberal democracy, the higher respect such states would have for life-integrity (or the more checks there would be against violations). Citizens would be free to express themselves and to participate politically without fear of loss of life, liberty, and violation by state agents. Thus, respect...
In a recent article, Arend Lijphart suggests that (re)-introducing compulsory voting could be used to reduce inequalities in electoral representation. Belgium is one of the few countries in the world with a generalised system of compulsory voting. Using data from the Belgian election study, our simulation shows that abolishing this obligation would lead to a clear overrepresentation of citizen with higher education levels: the willingness to vote is mainly determined by the amount of formal education the respondents have received. Abolishing compulsory voting would lead to more inequality. In this sense, our data support the Lijphart thesis.
State-building is a central tenet of many current development efforts. This primacy of the state rests on a global normative script that emphasizes the role of the modern state in providing collective goods and services from security to education to health. We analyze state performance in six dimensions of service delivery in a cross-sectional sample of more than 150 countries. In addition to exploring the explanatory power of statehood, we examine various control variables and also analyze whether external actors affect the delivery of collective goods and services. The core finding of this article is that there is remarkably little evidence of a consistent relationship between statehood and service delivery. This result casts doubt on the conventional wisdom about the centrality of the state for the provision collective goods and services, and suggests that other factors may explain the observed variation.
When turnout fell to a near-historic low in 1988, the two sources of government statistics suggested opposite reasons. One is that fewer and fewer people are registered to vote, and the other that registered voters are going to the polls less and less.
According to the figures supplied by state election officials who tally up county registration totals and record election returns, voting by registered voters is down 15 percentage points since 1960: 85.4% voted that year, but only 70.5% in 1988. By contrast, the U.S. Census reported that 86.2% of registered voters cast ballots in 1988, down only 4.8 percentage points since 1968 (when the Census postelection sample surveys of both registration and voting were first undertaken) (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1989). The 1988 result confirmed the earlier Census summary conclusion for the presidential elections between 1968-80 that registered voters “overwhelmingly go to the polls” (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1984a).
The Census surveys show that falling registration is the more important cause of declining turnout: the level slipped from 74.3% in 1968 to 66.6% in 1988, or 7.7 percentage points. Adjusting that result downward by about 10% to correct for the tendency by some respondents to tell the Census interviewers they are registered when they are not, the 1988 level of registration was 59%. State data, by contrast, show a much higher registration level: 70.9% in 1988, off only 4.5 percentage points since 1960.
While the economic voting literature is voluminous, comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of how—or whether—the economy affects turnout. I address this issue by examining national elections in 29 countries. Using time series data, the initial findings are replicated by a case study of American presidential and midterm elections since 1896. It is argued that the effect of economic adversity depends upon the degree of welfare state development. This relationship is argued to be nonlinear, so that mobilization occurs at either extreme while withdrawal obtains in the middle range. The importance to democratic theory, the study of elections, and the politics of welfare policy are discussed.
Using a risk assessment method developed by Gurr and Moore (American Journal of Political Science 41: 1079–1103, 1997) and applying O’Brien’s (Journal of Conflict Resolution 46: 791–811, 2002) risk assessment metrics, we present a global, comparative, cross-national model predicting the states where political violence is likely to increase. Our model predicts more political violence when governments violate the physical integrity rights of their citizens—especially when they frequently imprison citizens for political reasons or make them “disappear”. These coercive techniques may create more citizen dissatisfaction than other types of violations of physical integrity rights, because citizens perceive political imprisonment and disappearances as the direct result of the deliberate policy choices of politicians. Our model also forecasts more political violence in weak states and states that allow dissatisfied citizens to coordinate their anti-government activities. Specifically, we demonstrate that political violence tends to be higher if governments respect their citizens’ right to freedom of assembly and association and offer widespread use of mobile phone and internet technology.
Abstract will be provided by author.
Democracy has been defined and measured in various ways. This article argues that combining two basic dimensions of democracy - competition and participation - can yield a theoretically satisfactory measurement of democracy that employs three measures: degree of electoral competition, degree of electoral participation and a combined index of democratization. These variables have been used in the author's previous comparative studies of democracy. The new dataset combines previous data and extends these to cover the period 1810-1998. That dataset includes 187 contemporary and former independent states from the year 1810 or from the year of independence. In the dataset, original electoral and other political data needed to calculate the values of Competition and Participation variables are given and documented separately for each country. The values of the three variables are calculated and given for each year over the period of comparison. Finally, the new dataset is compared with the Polity98 measures of democracy and the combined Freedom House ratings of political rights and civil liberties.
This paper tests the proposition that an electorate disproportionately representative of higher-class citizens will be rewarded with public policies in favor of its economic interests and at the expense of the interests of lower-class citizens. We find a consistent negative relationship between the degree of class bias favoring the upper class and the generosity of indigenous state social welfare spending. We also find that it is the underrepresentation of the poor, rather than the overrepresentation of the wealthy, that principally explains this relationship. These findings have important implications for democratic theory generally and for present-day concern about the composition of the U.S. electorate.
This crossnational study seeks to explain variations in governmental repression of human rights to personal integrity (state terrorism) in a 153-country sample during the eighties. We outline theoretical perspectives on this topic and subject them to empirical tests using a technique appropriate for our pooled cross-sectional time-series design, namely, ordinary least squares with robust standard errors and a lagged dependent variable. We find democracy and participation in civil or international war to have substantively important and statistically significant effects on repression. The effects of economic development and population size are more modest. The hypothesis linking leftist regime types to abuse of personal integrity rights receives some support. We find no reliable evidence that population growth, British cultural influence, military control, or economic growth affect levels of repression. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for scholars and practitioners concerned with the prevention of personal integrity abuse.
We examine the roles of democratic politics and political institutions in shaping social welfare spending in 18 contemporary capitalist democracies. We explore the social spending consequences of government partisanship, electoral competition and turnout, and the self-interested behaviors of politicians and bureaucrats, as well as such relatively durable facets of political institutions as neocorporatism, state centralization, and traditionalist policy legacies. Pooled time series analyses of welfare effort in 18 nations during the 1960–82 period show that electoral turnout, as well as left and center governments increase welfare effort; that the welfare efforts of governments led by particular types of parties show significant differences and vary notably with the strength of oppositional (and junior coalitional) parties; and that relatively neocorporatist, centralized, and traditionalistic polities are high on welfare effort. Overall, our findings suggest that contrary to many claims, both partisan and nonpartisan facets of democratic politics and political institutions shape contemporary social welfare effort.
What is the effect of regime type on public expenditures for social programs? We investigate the relationship between democracy and the change in social spending-controlling for GDP, the debt, inflation, and age structure of the population-through a time-series cross-sectional panel data set far 17 Latin American countries from 1980 to 1992. The results show that, especially in poor countries during economic crisis, democracies increase the allocation of resources to social programs relative to authoritarian regimes. This suggests that the latter are more constrained by economic forces, whereas democracies are more constrained by popular demands. Hence, calls to abandon broad categorizations of regime type appear to be premature: Democracy can matter in systematic and substantial ways.
This article outlines the basic parameters and current status of the Integrated Data for Event Analysis (IDEA) project. IDEA provides a comprehensive events framework for the analysis of international interactions by supplementing the event forms from all earlier projects with new event forms needed to monitor contemporary trends in civil and interstate politics. It uses a more flexible multi-leveled event and actor/target hierarchy that can be expanded to incorporate new event forms and actors/targets, and adds dimensions that can be employed to construct indicators for early warning and assessing conflict escalation. IDEA is currently being used in the automatedcoding of news reports (Reuters Business Briefs) and, in collaboration withother projects, in the analysis of field reports. The article summarizes the conceptual framework being used in this data development effort, its major variables, and its geographic and temporal coverage.
What exactly is it about democracy that enables it to protect human rights? As part of the research program addressing that important question, this article examines the relationship between democratic national legislative and presidential elections and government respect for human rights in over 100 countries from 1981 to 2000. Both presidential (direct and semi-presidential) and lower-house national legislative elections are found to be reliably associated with greater government respect for human rights, but only in the years following an election and not in election years themselves. Interestingly, national legislative elections were found to be associated with greater government respect for human rights, while presidential elections were associated with less respect for human rights. Consequently, the authors caution that the historically popular concept of electoralism (the use of elections alone as a proxy for full democracy) is unlikely to play a positive part in any policy intending to protect human rights.
Recent decades have seen an explosion of transnational networking and activism, but participation varies widely around the globe. Using negative binomial regression, we explore how national and global political and economic factors shape this "uneven geography" of participation in transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs). Contrary to assumptions in popular discourse, we find a continued importance of the state and limited importance of global economic integration in determining participation in transnational associations. But while ties to the global economy do not significantly impact participation, a country's links to global institutions enhance opportunities for transnational activism. Rich countries' citizens are more active transnationally, but low-income countries with strong ties to the global polity are also more tied to global activist networks. This suggests that TSMOs do not simply reproduce world-system stratification, but – aided by a supportive institutional environment – they help sow the seeds for its transformation.
The CIRI Human Rights Data Project provides information about government respect for a broad array of human rights in nearly every country in the world. Covering twenty-six years, fifteen separate human rights practices, and 195 countries, it is one of the largest human rights data sets in the world. This essay provides an overview of the CIRI project and our response to some critiques of the CIRI physical integrity rights index. Compared to the Political Terror Scale (PTS), the CIRI physical integrity rights index is focused on government human rights practices, can be disaggregated, is more transparent in its construction, and is more replicable because of the transparency of our coding rules. Furthermore, unlike the PTS, the unidimensionality of the CIRI index has been demonstrated empirically. For these reasons, the CIRI index is a more valid index of physical integrity rights.
This paper uses a new typology of authoritarian regimes to explore the extent to which regime type explains the survival (and breakdown) of non-democratic regimes as well as the impact of different types of authoritarian regimes on democratic development. Our results demonstrate that different types of authoritarian regime face different propensities to develop toward democracy. Hence the nature of the authoritarian regime in question deserves to be added to the list of democracy's essential preconditions. One regime typeâthe limited multiparty systemâstands out as the prime stepping stone to democracy. The fact that this regime type has become the most common form of authoritarianism can be seen as a promising sign for the future.
In order to function as an effective constraint on human rights violations, democratic competition must put politicians in a situation where it is electorally beneficial for them to monitor abuses and to expose public officials who fail to protect human rights. In the absence of proper electoral incentives, both incumbent politicians and opposition leaders may strategically choose to ignore poor human rights practices. Building on this logic, we assess the proposition that, among democracies, certain electoral rules are associated with better protection of physical integrity rights. We find that, other things equal, there is higher average respect for physical integrity rights in countries where all members of parliament are elected through low magnitude proportional representation districts, and where voters can cast a vote for individual candidates. Our theoretical approach focusing on incentives for politicians to protect human rights offers a unifying framework for studying institutional and noninstitutional effects on different categories of human rights.
We examine the question of economic voting in the major industrial democracies. Using pooled time series data for 17 nations from 1960 to 1987, we argue that the magnitude and nature of the relationship between economic conditions and the vote depends upon the level of welfare state development. We find that (a) in countries with low to moderate levels of welfare spending, the economy has a more dramatic effect on the vote when things are good than when things are bad, and (b) the economy plays less of a role in states with high levels of spending, regardless of the direction of economic change. The implications for voting behavior, democratic accountability, and welfare policy are discussed.
We examine the determinants of social expenditure in an unbalanced pooled time-series analysis for 18 Latin American countries for the period 1970 to 2000. This is the first such analysis of spending in Latin American countries with a full complement of regime, partisanship, state structure, economic, and demographic variables, making our analysis comparable to analyses of welfare states in advanced industrial countries. Democracy matters in the long run both for social security and welfare and for health and education spending, and—in stark contrast to OECD countries—partisanship does not matter. Highly repressive authoritarian regimes retrench spending on health and education, but not on social security.
Low voter turnout is a serious democratic problem for five reasons: (1) It means unequal turnout that is systematically biased against less well-to-do citizens. (2) Unequal turnout spells unequal political influence. (3) U.S. voter turnout is especially low, but, measured as percent of voting-age population, it is also relatively low in most other countries. (4) Turnout in midterm, regional, local, and supranational elections--less salient but by no means unimportant elections--tends to be especially poor. (5) Turnout appears to be declining everywhere. The problem of inequality can be solved by institutional mechanisms that maximize turnout. One option is the combination of voter-friendly registration rules, proportional representation, infrequent elections, weekend voting, and holding less salient elections concurrently with the most important national elections. The other option, which can maximize turnout by itself, is compulsory voting. Its advantages far outweigh the normative and practical objections to it.
States whose agents engage in torture in a given year have a 93 percent chance of continuing to torture in the following year. What leads governments to stop the use of torture? We focus on the principal–agent relationship between the executive and the individuals responsible for supervising and interrogating state prisoners. We argue that some liberal democratic institutions change the probability that leaders support the creation of institutions that discourage jailers and interrogators from engaging in torture, thus increasing the probability of a state terminating its use of torture. These relationships are strongly conditioned by the presence of violent dissent; states rarely terminate the use of torture when they face a threat. Once campaigns of violent dissent stop, however, states with popular suffrage and a free press are considerably more likely to terminate their use of torture. Also given the end of violent dissent, the greater the number of veto points in government, the lower the likelihood that a state terminates its use of torture.
This study explores the relationships between state violations of different human rights. Though most quantitative studies in international relations treat different types of repressive behavior as either independent or arising from the same underlying process, significant insights are gained by conceptualizing different human rights violations as separate but dependent processes. We present a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the mechanisms relating human rights practices and produce a novel measurement strategy based on network analysis for exploring these relationships. We illustrate high levels of complementarity between most human rights practices. Substitution effects, in contrast, are occasionally substantial but relatively rare. Finally, using empirically informed Monte Carlo analyses, we present predictions regarding likely sequences of rights violations resulting in extreme violations of different physical integrity rights.
Research on human rights consistently points to the importance of democracy in reducing the severity and incidence of personal integrity abuses. The prescriptive implications of this finding for policy makers interested in state building have been somewhat limited, however, by a reliance on multidimensional measures of democracy. Consequently, a policy maker emerges from this literature confident that “democracy matters” but unclear about which set(s) of reforms is likely to yield a greater human rights payoff. Using data from the Polity IV Project, we examine what aspects of democracy are most consequential in improving a state's human rights record. Analysis of democracy's dimensions elicits three findings. First, political participation at the level of multiparty competition appears more significant than other dimensions in reducing human rights abuses. Second, improvements in a state's level of democracy short of full democracy do not promote greater respect for integrity rights. Only those states with the highest levels of democracy, not simply those conventionally defined as democratic, are correlated with better human rights practices. Third, accountability appears to be the critical feature that makes full-fledged democracies respect human rights; limited accountability generally retards improvement in human rights.
Here we seek to build on our earlier research (Poe and Tate, 1994) by re-testing similar models on a data set covering a much longer time span; the period from 1976 to 1993. Several of our findings differ from those of our earlier work. Here we find statistical evidence that military regimes lead to somewhat greater human rights abuse, defined in terms of violations of personal integrity, once democracy and a host of other factors are controlled. Further, we find that countries that have experienced British colonial influence tend to have relatively fewer abuses of personal integrity rights than others. Finally, our results suggest that leftist countries are actually less repressive of these basic human rights than non-leftist countries. Consistent with the Poe and Tate (1994) study, however, we find that past levels of repression, democracy, population size, economic development, and international and civil wars exercise statistically significant and substantively important impacts on personal integrity abuse.
This article identifies and addresses key conceptual and measurement issues raised by measures of state capacity in studies of civil conflict. First, it reviews competing definitions and operationalizations of state capacity, focusing specifically on those that emphasize (1) military capacity, (2) bureaucratic administrative capacity, and (3) the quality and coherence of political institutions. Second, it critically assesses these measures on the basis of construct validity, focusing attention on whether they accurately capture the theoretical concept of state capacity, and whether they allow the researcher to differentiate between competing causal mechanisms. Third, it employs principal factor analysis to identify the underlying dimensionality of 15 different operationalizations of state capacity. State capacity is characterized by low dimensionality, with three factors - or dimensions of state capacity -explaining over 90% of the variance in the 15 measures. While the first factor, rational legality, captures bureaucratic and administrative capacity, the second, rentier-autocraticness, and third, neopatrimoniality, capture aspects of state capacity that cut across theoretical categories. The article concludes by suggesting a multivariate approach to modeling state capacity, and that (1) survey measures of bureaucratic quality, and (2) tax capacity are the most theoretically and empirically justified.
This paper studies the links between public spending, governance, and outcomes. We examine the role of governance–measured by the level of corruption and the quality of bureaucracy–in determining the efficacy of public spending in improving human development outcomes. Our analysis contributes to our understanding of the relationship between public spending, governance and outcomes, and helps explain the surprising result that public spending often does not yield the expected improvement in outcomes. We show empirically that the differences in the efficacy of public spending can be largely explained by the quality of governance. Public health spending lowers child mortality rates more in countries with good governance. Similarly, public spending on primary education becomes more effective in increasing primary education attainment in countries with good governance. More generally, public spending has virtually no impact on health and education outcomes in poorly governed countries. These findings have important implications for enhancing the development effectiveness of public spending. The lessons are particularly relevant for developing countries, where public spending on education and health is relatively low, and the state of governance is often poor.
Determinants of political participation and electoral turnout are still of great interest within political science and three broad types of factors have been found to influence turnout significantly; individual or area-specific traits, characteristics of the electoral systems, and features relating to the political climate in individual elections. Within the first group, socio-economic resources, typically education, income, and occupation, have been found to be particularly important. This article proposes that public health is also a relevant form of social and political resources at the aggregate level. Regional data on life expectancy and electoral turnout from Russia—a country with dramatically deteriorated public health during the 1990s—were therefore correlated with each other. Overall, correlations were positive and significant, and there is, then, reason to investigate further the possible relationship between public health and the propensity to turn out at elections.